141,597 research outputs found
Evidence of TeV gamma-ray emission from the nearby starburst galaxy NGC 253
TeV gamma-rays were recently detected from the nearby normal spiral galaxy
NGC 253 (Itoh et al., 2002). Observations to detect the Cherenkov light images
initiated by gamma-rays from the direction of NGC 253 were carried out in 2000
and 2001 over a total period of 150 hours. The orientation of images in
gamma-ray--like events is not consistent with emission from a point source, and
the emission region corresponds to a size greater than 10 kpc in radius. Here,
detailed descriptions of the analysis procedures and techniques are given.Comment: 16 pages, 27 figures, aa.cl
Mode-Suppression: A Simple, Stable and Scalable Chunk-Sharing Algorithm for P2P Networks
The ability of a P2P network to scale its throughput up in proportion to the
arrival rate of peers has recently been shown to be crucially dependent on the
chunk sharing policy employed. Some policies can result in low frequencies of a
particular chunk, known as the missing chunk syndrome, which can dramatically
reduce throughput and lead to instability of the system. For instance, commonly
used policies that nominally "boost" the sharing of infrequent chunks such as
the well known rarest-first algorithm have been shown to be unstable. Recent
efforts have largely focused on the careful design of boosting policies to
mitigate this issue. We take a complementary viewpoint, and instead consider a
policy that simply prevents the sharing of the most frequent chunk(s).
Following terminology from statistics wherein the most frequent value in a data
set is called the mode, we refer to this policy as mode-suppression. We also
consider a more general version that suppresses the mode only if the mode
frequency is larger than the lowest frequency by a fixed threshold. We prove
the stability of mode-suppression using Lyapunov techniques, and use a Kingman
bound argument to show that the total download time does not increase with peer
arrival rate. We then design versions of mode-suppression that sample a small
number of peers at each time, and construct noisy mode estimates by aggregating
these samples over time. We show numerically that the variants of
mode-suppression yield near-optimal download times, and outperform all other
recently proposed chunk sharing algorithms
Constraints on Low-Mass WIMP Interactions on 19F from PICASSO
Recent results from the PICASSO dark matter search experiment at SNOLAB are
reported. These results were obtained using a subset of 10 detectors with a
total target mass of 0.72 kg of 19F and an exposure of 114 kgd. The low
backgrounds in PICASSO allow recoil energy thresholds as low as 1.7 keV to be
obtained which results in an increased sensitivity to interactions from Weakly
Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with masses below 10 GeV/c^2. No dark
matter signal was found. Best exclusion limits in the spin dependent sector
were obtained for WIMP masses of 20 GeV/c^2 with a cross section on protons of
sigma_p^SD = 0.032 pb (90% C.L.). In the spin independent sector close to the
low mass region of 7 GeV/c2 favoured by CoGeNT and DAMA/LIBRA, cross sections
larger than sigma_p^SI = 1.41x10^-4 pb (90% C.L.) are excluded.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, to be published in Phys. Lett.
The APM Galaxy Survey:- V. Catalogues of Galaxy Clusters
We describe the construction of catalogues of galaxy clusters from the APM
Galaxy survey using an automated algorithm based on Abell-like selection
criteria. We investigate the effects of varying several parameters in our
selection algorithm, including the magnitude range, and radius from the cluster
centre used to estimate the cluster richnesses. We quantify the accuracy of the
photometric distance estimates by comparing with measured redshifts, and we
investigate the stability and completeness of the resulting catalogues. We find
that the angular correlation functions for different cluster catalogues are in
good agreement with one another, and are also consistent with the observed
amplitude of the spatial correlation function of rich clusters.Comment: 14 pages, PostScript, including 15 figures, submitted to MNRAS. Also
available from ftp://ftp-astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/pub/gbd/papers/apm5.ps.g
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